On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 2:53 AM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
> Points 2 and 3 seem to be in conflict with each other, and in many ways they
> are, but there is a strong feeling that an on-page text only link is, while
> certainly one option, also somewhat archaic and will be avoided as often as
> used because of design considerations.
Transcript links seem a lot more common than (say) D-links.
Has anyone ever come across a case of a publisher that refused to
include a link to a transcript because of design considerations?
>> * one problem is that <a> elements inside a <transcript> (e.g. to link
>> to doc or pdf transcripts) would be focusable even when hidden from
>> sight
>> -> maybe we can avoid using <a> elements, but how?
>
> This is a significant potential problem. A list of links placed in a div
> off-screen will still take tab focus, but will not actually show where that
> focus is for sighted, keyboard only users. While we have this problem today
> (the notorious skip-nav links) moving forward a design that does not
> encourage this kind of poor user-experience is a key goal.
This is trivial to fix with CSS:
transcript a { position: absolute; left: -999999px; }
transcript a:focus { position: static; }
Authors don't have good awareness of the need for visible focus, but
this problem is not particular to transcript links.
Maybe one could come up with a generic solution to this problem along
the lines of "display: hidden-until-focused".
But this would still leave the transcript with have poor discovery for
the typical (mousing, sighted) user. As these users want access to
transcripts too, I'd expect publishers to use visible links. Has
anyone ever come across a case of a publisher that included a
transcript link, hid it with CSS and failed to make it visible on
focus?
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis